Review: As all-star whodunits go, ‘Glass Onion’ has enormous appeal – to the degree that it’s more than a half-hour of movie-making for non-gamers
The way the film plays out is more familiar than most. There’s a guy on a mission to find the Glass Onion, a giant golden sphere which is supposed to give you all sorts of insights into all of your character’s past lives, past relationships, and so on – you know, the kind of stuff you can read in the dictionary. (If your dictionary has that kind of stuff in it, why not just buy the damned thing and have it by your side? I have no idea.)
You meet him at the local tavern (a real tavern, of course) where he’s trying to look up the bartender’s information, to find out whether he’s a dead ringer for the character he’s played in previous Glass Onion incarnations. That’s when the bartender reveals he’s not the man he’s been impersonating.
Except, not quite – in this case, the real guy isn’t as dead as we’d first hoped. And so, as is the story with these kinds of movies, our hero has to solve the mysteries of the real life person who wasn’t really the original Bartender.
I had high hopes for As I Lay Dying and the way the production was planned. I had high hopes for the lead actors (even high hopes for Robert Duvall). I had high hopes for director Oliver Stone (who would also direct). The film went completely by the wayside (though he’d just return with The Doors and Natural Born Killers), and it seemed like there was going to be an awful lot of hype surrounding it once it was finished. He was very disappointed when it was not a hit.
But to his credit, he wrote the script, and the film turns out to be an excellent mix of hard-hitting drama and sly comedy. While there have been plenty of low-budget and independent films done in the 80’s and 90’s, few have come close to this one. The performances are extraordinary (especially from Duvall). The cinematography is gorgeous. It’s a film that doesn’t feel like just another “